We need you to be:

• A confident team player with well developed decision making skills.
• Qualified in resource management, planning or related areas
• Experienced in policy development, preparing or processing resource consent applications or assessing environmental effects – tell us where your skills lie
• A great communicator with excellent report writing skills and the ability to build lasting and effective relationships with clients, customers and colleagues alike
• Committed to achieving a good work-life balance

We offer you:

• A great team working environment
• Interesting and varied work from resource consents to policy development projects for a wide range of clients largely based in the lower North Island
• The opportunity to make the job what you want it to be – develop your specialisation and grow a client list with us.
• Flexible working hours and locations. If you are looking for full time, part time, work from home or flexi-time options, that is good for us too!
• A great lifestyle in the sunny Wairarapa. Everything from wine and cafe culture, to beach and mountain outdoor adventures is on offer. If you’re not already converted to the Wairarapa lifestyle, check out www.wairarapanz.com for inspiration.

For more information phone us on 06 3066105, or check out our website, wwww.perceptionplanning.co.nz.

We also have a listing for this job on Trade Me

Applicants for this position should have NZ residency or a valid NZ work permit

The Government takes a slightly more jaundiced view of the ability of regulatory instruments such as MUL to deliver the growth Auckland will undoubtedly need to accommodate the near-million additional people expected to flock to the metropolis over the next 40 years.  In its recent position paper on urban form, the Government cites Auckland’s over-emphasis on MUL as a tool to direct growth as a significant deterrent to private investment in development opportunities.  Perhaps more disturbing still is evidence to suggest that even when the private sector can be convinced to take the plunge and actually develop, the physical results do not always meet the expectations and needs of households and businesses.

For Government, the gloves are most assuredly off when it comes to ensuring that Auckland’s future economic potential is unleashed.  The Super City is being strongly advised to cast off its regulatory corset and go for something distinctly more blousy: a spatial plan that allows for ‘well-planned expansion of the urban area beyond the existing footprint’, that generates a ‘more realistic mix of greenfield opportunities’, supports infill and targeted intensification in sub-regional centres, and results in a strong CBD.  Naturally, this all sits quite comfortably with the Beehive’s companion vision for transport in which the growth in car travel is inevitable and new roads will proliferate; if you are feeling cynical, the ‘build them and they will drive’ approach to infrastructure planning.

What would our urban adventurer extraordinaire, Dan Koeppel, make of these two visions?  Well, given that his modus operandi for exploration, for understanding and loving his urban environment, is predicated as much on the availability of mass public transport as it is on his penchant for metropolitan thrill seeking, my feeling is that Koeppel is more of a Brown man than a Key guy.   In fact, Koeppel’s flagrant use of LA’s mass transit system, and the willingness with which he takes to his bike or legs to propel him round his urban playground could easily make him something of a poster boy for Brown during his Spatial Plan campaign.   Indeed, such is the ‘alignment of services’ in LA that Koeppel was even able sell his car!  Imagine….

Whatever your feelings about urban sprawl, whether you look forward to more of it or have got it all crossed that Smart Growth will come along to stop it in its tracks, the inescapable fact is Auckland already has quite a lot of it, not all of it is pleasant to look at or be in, and some of it is jolly hard to get to (unless of course you have a car and decent sat nav).    Looking through the Koeppel/Brown lens, genuine, multi-modal connectivity and accessibility would appear to be two of the keys that could liberate our existing spatially besieged neighbourhoods, as well as unlock the potential of a range of urban futures.  Certainly, there is considerable evidence emerging that increasing social diversity, an ageing demography, and the development of more sophisticated urban tastes are pointing towards what Professor Roger Lewis describes as a ‘more-urban existence’ of ‘walkable neighbourhoods’ and “sustainably designed communities characterized by diverse land uses and a broad array of civic amenities”.  This population of new urbanites is burgeoning, and becoming increasingly fluent and coherent in expressing their wants and needs.   According to Professor Lewis, their ‘close-to-home wish list’ includes

• Transit access;
• Plenty of shopping;
• Cultural, recreational and entertainment venues;
• Parks and playgrounds; good public schools;
• Health-care services;
• Job opportunities; and
• Affordable housing.

Professor Lewis may be writing from an American perspective, but keep your ear to the ground and I think you’ll hear many an urban dwelling Kiwi crying out a similar wish list to that of their cousins over the water.  The question is: which vision is capable of delivering the connectivity Auckland needs to begin to join the dots of its currently disconnected, dispersed and disparate communities?  In our next city-centric blog, we take a more specific look at the concept and practice of connectivity and walkability in urban centres around the globe, and ask what lessons Auckland’s Spatial Set could learn from these examples.

Flicking through a running magazine the other day, I came across these words from Dan Koeppel, self-proclaimed transit geek and, somewhat surprisingly, something of an expert on bananas:

“I love Los Angeles.  I love the way it sprawls.  I love the way it challenges navigation, and the way – with more than 20,000 miles of road – it invites exploration.”^[i]

Koeppel’s reflections on Los Angeles come in the midst of a fascinating article in which he describes his journey to becoming a runner through exploration of his home city.  Using a compass and a map, Koeppel enters a game with the city, drawing circles around his house initially with a radius of half a mile.  The circle acts as a perimeter fence within which Koeppel’s challenge is to never take the same route twice.  As his fitness increases, so too does the radius of his circles.  Whether you are a runner, a plodder, or plain old couch potato, it’s hard to deny the allure and appeal of Koeppel’s depiction of LA as “a giant board game, a living map of infinite possibilities”.

Initially, however, I struggled to tune in to Koeppel’s easy-going positivity about urban sprawl. ‘Challenges navigation….invites exploration’ – a post-modern twist on the time-honoured phrase ‘hopelessly lost’ surely?   I’m a town planner, schooled to regard post-industrial urban sprawl as the spatial expression of humanity’s fondness for excess.   The result of a car dominated culture and a belief that our resources of land and petroleum are limitless, urban sprawl has been held responsible for what Jane Jacobs bleakly sums up as “delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness”[ii], not to mention contributing to the loss and degradation of our natural environments and habitats.

Dig a little deeper into the Koeppel archive, though, and one gets a tantalising glimpse as to how this Urban Pioneer can see and experience beauty and potential in sprawl where the rest of us see only what Lewis Mumford described as ‘solidified chaos’.  It’s all down to adopting a Positive (or maybe obsessive) Mental Attitude… and mass public transport.  Koeppel is self-confessedly ‘obsessed’ with walking in Los Angeles.  And he doesn’t just talk the walk, so to speak, he walks it, baby – in 2009 he launched the first  (and now annual) Big Parade – a two-day walk and general good-time jamboree through the City, which counts as one of its aims, and indeed achievements, “that Los Angeles is – not could be – a walkable city”.  And when he’s not walking, he’s “discovering the region’s transport system, […] combining buses, trains [and] bikes”.[iii] As he puts it himself, mass public transport ‘broadened his reach’.

So, you have to hand it to Koeppel.  His take on urban sprawl makes for a refreshing change from the typical hand wringing that accompanies reflections on homo sapien’s long and occasionally dysfunctional love affair with the urban environment.  The kind of hand wringing that’s taking place in New Zealand just now on the big and perplexing question of what to do with some of the nation’s most impressive and extensive urban sprawl aka the city of Auckland.   In the next blog, we explore what Len Brown’s vision and John Key’s wishlist for the City could mean for the identity, character and extent of its urban sprawl, and question whether either are up to the job of unleashing the potential of our urban futures.